Character Flaws

Like Their Creator, The Central Figures In Ethan Canin's 2nd Novel Fail To Evolve

September 06, 1998|By Christopher Durso. Christopher Durso is senior editor of The New Physician, the magazine of the American Medical Student Association.

FOR KINGS AND PLANETS

By Ethan Canin

Random House, 335 pages, $24.95

Ethan Canin's body of fiction reminds me of a single polished stone that, at first glance, seems muted and monochromatic. No matter the subject or the characters, it appears to cast a singular thematic glow-the idea that character is fate, as Canin spells it out, citing Heraclitus, in two of the four stories in his 1994 collection "The Palace Thief." Because so much of his work is superficially alike--stories of men and their fathers, wives, brothers and friends, of the consequences of being in control and letting go-he appears to break no new ground.

Fortunately, it's not quite that simple. In each story in "The Palace Thief" and his superb debut collection, "Emperor of the Air," Canin holds his stone to the light, turns it ever so slightly, and suddenly we see new features, angles, depths-variations on a theme. In his short fiction, the variety that Canin has wrung from his potentially trite conceit is astonishing: an old man who turns to poetry to thaw his frozen, 46-year marriage, in "We Are Nighttime Travelers"; a teenager who must choose between running his father's grocery store and watching the stars from the roof of the store, in "Starfood"; a straight-arrow accountant who breaks quite suddenly out of character, in "The Accountant."

But when Canin tries to expand his canvas, as with 1991's "Blue River," his stone begins to show cracks. He is on familiar ground in "Blue River," revisiting the two brothers from "American Beauty," an "Emperor of the Air" story, and showing the seemingly predictable arcs their lives have followed, the fates their characters have bestowed upon them: The "good" brother is now a responsible eye surgeon, while the perennial screwup is a drifter. Ultimately, however, "Blue River" is lacking in surface area; it is as finely wrought as any of Canin's stories, but it is essentially a one-act play set on an epic stage.

So, too, with Canin's second novel, "For Kings and Planets." Again, we have two men, friends this time: small-town Missourian Orno Tarcher and Upper East Side misfit Marshall Emerson, who meet as freshmen at Columbia University. Their story-Orno's story, actually, with Marshall as an often-unseen but gravity-exerting supporting player-unfolds in a frustratingly episodic manner, right from the Gatsbyesque beginning in which Orno, like a less-discriminating Nick Carraway, is "almost ... taken away from himself" by the city, by "the shining stone staircases, the taxicabs, the sea of nighttime lights," by Marshall and his cigarettes and poetry and bohemian friends.

Character is indeed fate, for though button-down Orno unbends with a natty fedora and a smoking jacket, a Russian girlfriend and a fling or two, it isn't too long before college is behind him and, over Marshall's objections, he has settled on a stable, responsible career path. Meanwhile, Marshall, whom Orno has rescued from a suicide attempt, moves to Los Angeles, begins writing a dense, pretentious novel ("Estophius Adams returned to the land of his ancestral past on a day of magni-ficence and fervent heat . . ."), then pursues show-biz writing and cocaine, all the while maintaining a steady patter of glib self-loathing.

Canin's writing has always been formal and poised, lending his characters a quiet authority. Strongest are his middle-age or elderly unreliable narrators, control freaks who, like Stevens the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day," inadvertently let the reader in on what really happened. Canin is at his subtle best in the story "The Palace Thief," about a retired history teacher who is blind to his inability to learn from his own past.